Adherents.com: Religious Groups in Literature

34,420 citations from literature (mostly science fiction and fantasy) referring to real churches, religious groups, tribes, etc. [This database is for literary research only. It is not intended as a source of information about religion.]

Islam, continued...

"'...They had some dolls, in Tirana. In the tourist hotels there. For business entertainment, you understand... but they took the courtesans out and shot them last year, when the new government took power. One thing on which we Greeks and Muslims agree is that [genetically engineered] fairies and dolls are an abomination in the sight of God. These fairies that are here now have come from other countries...' "

"And all over the world, old scores were being settled... Some people were turning to religion. Others were turning against it: there had been several assassination attempts on the pope, and something like a jihad seemed to be raging in Algeria. "

"'But I met sheiks and warriors and holy men. I rode with the Bedouins. My sword was forged in Damascus. I lived in a hareem... The Sultan took us into his household. A less brave and ethical man would have put us out to die. Some of us did die, but his altruism saved most of us. His physicians watched over the grown men. The women of the household cared for the boys, the pages, for in the house of a devout Mahometan, the men live in one part of the house, the women and girls in another. Young boys live in the women's quarters until they reach a certain age and develop a certain attention... I came to my senses all aware, wondering if a god really did exist--'

'Of courrse He does!'

'Then He is Allah. He brought me into His garden to mock my disbelief...' "

[Aboard the starship Argo.] "The Place of Worship on level 11 wasn't more than an empty room, really. We didn't have the space to provide a dedicated church or synagogue or mosque or other specialized hall. Instead, this simple chamber, with seating for 500, served as called upon. "

"...Certainly, the questions had validity, but organized religion seemed quite a different thing to me. We had lost out on some good people because of it. A man named Roopshand, a telecommunications specialist, had passed all the test needed for joining us. Like all devout Moslems, he prayed five times a day while facing Mecca. Well, the Mecca part seemed easy--it and all of Earth should be straight down, directly beneath the floor. "

Pg. 70: "But, according to him [one prospective voyager, a Muslim, for the crew of the long-range exploration ship], the five times a day [prayer to Mecca] had to be five times per Earth day, which, as we picked up more and more speed, would become progressively more frequent. He looked at the flight profile and found that by the halfway point, at which we reach our maximum acceleration, some 24 Earth days would pass for each ship day, meaning he'd have to pray 120 times each ship day. That wasn't going to leave much time for sleep. The flip side, that the month-long Ramadan fast would be over in little more than a day, didn't seem to make up for it, and he bowed out of the mission. Fortunately, the 1,349 other Moslems who did come along with us seemed to have made peace with these issues. "; Pg. 1: "After all, even with 10,034 people on board... "

"Directly to the south of the RUS lay the Associated Islamic Republics, in a vast crescent from Morocco to Iran, abutting India which was still officially the world's largest democratic nation; unoficially a polyglot nation in the process of trading chaos for Islam. "

"'...Draw your line across the Earth, Ghaffar Wahabi. Declare that you will not make war against the great Indian people who have not yet heard the word of Allah, but will instead show to all the world the shining example of the purity of Pakistan. While in the meantime, Tikal Chapekar will unite eastern Asian under Indian leadership, which they have long hungered for. Then, in the happy day when the Hindu people heed the Book, Islam will spread in one breath from New Delhi to Hanoi.'

...'Hanoi,' said Wahabi. 'Why not Beijing?'

'On the day that the Indian Muslims of Pakistan are made guardians of the sacred city, on that day the Hindus may imagine entering the forbidden city.' "

"'Do you think Iran will peacefully accept Pakistan's leadership? Do you think the Turks will embrace us? It will have to be by conquest that we create this unity.'

'But you will create it... And when Islam is united under Indian leadership, it will no longer be humiliated by other nations. One great Muslim nation, one great Hindu nation, at peace with each other and too powerful for any other nation to dare to attack. That is how peace comes to Earth. God willing.'

"India overflew Sukkur and Karachi in two waves. The first was a horde of small choppers firing minicannon and homing missiles... Pakistan surrendered, obtained recognition as the State of Sulaiman, and was instantly absorbed by Inda as Moslems everywhere gave thanks. It was thought possible that India had deliberately provoked the River War. Perhaps 'possible' was too weak a word.

Now, in 1996, the fifty million Moslems of Sulaiman formed a gentle buffer as India's border with the AIR [Associated Islamic Republics] crescent. India was now one-third Moslem; her Hindu maority found it easier to accomodate Islam every day. "

"His search pattern had been scrambled by Shalmaneser, and as an added precaution the transcript of it he carried with him had been copied out in Yatakangi--a difficult and unpopular langague resembling Japanese in that it combined a welter of Chinese ideograms with two complete syllabaries, not, however, home-grown like the Japanese katakana but a bastard offshoot of Arabic script imported to the islands of South-East Asia in the late middle ages by Muslim proselytisers. "

"The Portuguese Brother belonged to a Christian group called the Order of Christ. This was part of the shadowy coalition that supported the Milton Foundation. The Order turned out to have roots going back to the fourteenth century. It was a religious-military society originally set up to attack Islam in its own territories. The Order had included Vasco de Gama, for example, one of whose specialties was hanging Muslims from his masts and using them for crossbow practice. "

'I was born in Brisbane, for crying out loud! Zada was born in Melbourne. My family is Australian four generations back.'

His protests made no difference. Ever since the Saladin Outbreak, customs checked all Muslims thoroughly. Fifty residents of Darwin had died from an outbreak of a biological weapon that the Saladins had released. Only a handful of Saladins had survived, and they were all in prison, and it had been years ago, but Australia still treated its Muslims as if every single one of them was a terrorist waiting for the opportunity to go berserk. " [Other refs. not in DB. The entire story is about two Muslims from Australia, though much of the story takes place in Saudi Arabia on their haj.]

"'Listen to me, daughter. I could show them the crib sheet and explain it to them, but then they would know the code, which is a terrifying possibility. There are people who have tried to design illnesses that attack only Jews or only blacks, but so far they have failed. The reason why they have failed is that there is no serological marker for black or Jewish blood. Now we stupid Muslims, and I count myself among the fools, have identified ourselves. In my blood is a code that says that I am a Muslim, not just by birth, but by active faith. I have marked myself. I might as well walk into a neo-Nazi rally wearing a Star of David.

'Maybe I am just a pessimist,' he continued. 'Maybe no one will design an anti-Muslim virus, but it is now technologically possible. The longer it takes the dhimmis to find out how, the better.' "

"We [Muslims in Australia] were insulted, shouted at, and spat on by men and women who then stepped into their exclusive clubs and talked about how uncivilized we were. Once it had been the Aborigines, then it had been the Italian and Greek immigrants; a generation later it was the Asians; now it was our turn. Da thought that we could leave for a while, go on our pilgrimage and return to a more settled nation, but our treatment by the customs officers indicated that little had changed in the year we were away.

...He sighed. 'Zada, it is hard to understand, but many people hate us for no reason other than our faith. I have never killed or hurt or stolen from anyone in my life, and yet people hate me because I pray in a church with a crescent instead of a cross.' "

"To his left, resting on a low table adjacent to a flat padded hassock, a copy of the Koran bound in green leather and tooled by hand with golden Arabic script listing the nine-and-ninety honourable names of the Almighty. "

"'A number of conflicting rituals have been found associated with the standard landmark-events: birth, purberty, marriage, bearing and fathering of children, sickness and death. Some are of local origin while many others can be assigned to Muslim or Christian influence...' "

"The Archduke was nosferatu, a provocation. The Slavs and Muslims of Bosnia-Hercegovina did not accept vampires, especially as rulers. Serbian irredentists trumpeted the prevalence of the undead at the King-Emperor's court to stir up those in Bosnia-Hercegovina who wished to be free from the bloodsucking Hapsburgs. "

"...said the minister, who was formally known as the Yang Taramat Pehin Orang Kaya Amar Diraja Dato Seri Paduka Abdul Kahar. He was minister of industrial policy for the Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam, a tiny nation on the northern shore of the island of Borneo... It was another slow Friday in Brunei Darussalam. Across the shallow bay, Brunei Town rose in tropical sunlight, its soaring high-rises festooned with makeshift solar roofs, windmills, and bulging greenhouse balconies. The golden-domed mosque on the waterfront was surrounded by the towering legacy of the twentieth-century oil boom... " [The entire story is set in Brunei.]

'Sure.' Turner said. 'Thanks.' She poured gracefully; innocent grape juice over ice. She was a Moslem, Turner thought, despite her dyed hair. Maybe that was why she was oddly standoffish.

He would have to bend the rules again. She was not conventionally pretty, but she had the kind of neurotic intensity that Turner had always found fatally attractive. And his love life had suffered in Brunei; the kampongs with their prying eyes and village gossip had cramped his style. He wondered how he could arrange to see her. It wasn't a question of just asking her out to dinner--it all depended on her kampong. Some were stricter than others. He might end up with half-a-dozen veiled Muslim chaperones--or maybe a gang of muscular cousins and brothers with a bad attitude about Western lechers. "

Pg. 349: "'I let them trap me... 'That's how I won their trust.' He took Turner's arm. 'But you let me know if you have money troubles here. Don't let the local Islamic Bank fast-talk you into anything. Come see me first.' "; Pg. 370: "'He's from the Ministry of Islamic Banking...' "

"...which was the Vietnamese Tet festival and the Chinese New Year. The Year of the Dog was ending, the Year of the Pig due to start on the first of February--and that date was the first day of Ramadan, the Moslem holy month of fasting. "

Islam

California

2010

Bury, Stephen. Interface. New York: Bantam (1994); pg. 317.

"All of the people here at the Southern California Rightist Coalition who had been brought up Christian (which was most of them) knew what was coming. The non-Christians were already so alienated by the heavily pork-oriented meal that they weren't talking much anyway. " [Suggests that the non-Christians in this conservative meeting are Muslims or Orthodox Jews.]

Islam

California

2053

Rucker, Rudy. Freeware. New York: Avon (1998; c. 1997); pg. 2.

Pg. 2: "Monique's mother Andrea was very strange. Sometimes, under the influence of certain chelated rare-earth polymers, she would form her body into a giant replica of the Koran or of the Book of Mormon and lie out in front of the beachfront Boardwalk amusement park, babbling about transfinite levels of heaven, chaotic feedback, and the angels Izra'il and Moroni. Her body was more mold than plastic, and it looked like she might fall apart anytime now, but Andrea had gotten rejuvenation treatments for herself before, and she planned to do it again--if she could get the money. "; Pg. 6: "In the past she'd used the gaseous verbiage of the King James Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Koran, but these days she modeled her speech patterns on the style of science journals. "

Islam

California

2053

Rucker, Rudy. Freeware. New York: Avon (1998; c. 1997); pg. 8.

"Spike Kimball had been a muscular Mormon missionary who'd asked Andrea for sex three years ago, and Abdul Quayoom had been an Islamic rug programmer who'd approached Andrea three years before that. If they'd been smarter, instead of trying to have sex with Andrea, they would have burned her in a puddle of alcohol...

'The direct control of a cheeseball must be of limited temporal duration... Otherwise the danger of discovery becomes too great. And it is indeed essential that the cheeseball be terminated in such a way that no trace of the user's thinking cap can be found in the remains. Do you want to hear what I did to Quayoom and Kimball? About how I helped them follow their death angels Moroni and Isra'il into the beyond?' " [More refs. to the character Quayoom, not all in DB, pg. 8.]

"There are no Egyptian customers, probably because of their supersensitivity about the flowery sentiments painted by patrons on the inside walls.

A BAS, ABUMOHAMMED WAS THE SON OF A VIRGIN DOGTHE SPHINX STINKSREMEMBER THE RED SEA!THE PROPHET HAS A CAMEL FETISH

Some of those who wrote the taunts have fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers who were themselves the objects of similar insults. But their descendants are thoroughly assimilated. Beverly Hillsians to the core. Of such is the kingdom of men. "

Pg. 4: "It was from these towers that the Muslim faithful were called to worship each day at sunset as the limousines whispered out with faceless powers behind each window... "; Pg. 21: "His pterodactyls truly flew across the primordial skies. His brontosaurs were mountains on their way to Mahomet. "

"The mantel over the fireplace was white now took, but the old black bust of Dante still stood on it, the only relic of his parents' previous taste in furnishings. Dante Allah Hairy, he used to think its name was. "

"'...or the nearly identical Allah...' " [Other refs., not all in DB.]

Islam

California: Los Angeles

2005

Gibson, William. Virtual Light. New York: Bantam (1993); pg. 40.

"...the music starts, and it's the intro to Chrome Koran's 'She God's Girlfriend.' Chevette, who has kind of a major thing for Chrome Koran, and cranks them on her bike whenever she needs a boost to proj on, just moves with it now, everybody dancing, even the icers from the bathroom. " [This rock group, 'Chrome Koran' is mentioned elsewhere in book, not in DB.]

"Two of the IPR's patients had been born to the Islamic faith. Their Countries had been difficult and disturbing places, magnificent from a research angle, easily worth ten times the three or four papers he had written on them, but not to Martin's taste. He had hoped to be able to train Islamic researchers to handle this particular cultural and religious terra, but had not been allowed enough time. "

"'The Flood Mansion contains a 'Moorish' smoking room,' I informed him. 'Among its features is a black lump of stone carefully displayed in a glass case. Mr. Flood purchased it under the impression that it was an actual piece of the Qaaba from Mecca, chipped loose by an enterprising Yankee adventurer. He was, of course, defrauded; the stone is in fact a meteorite, and preliminary spectrographic analysis indicates it originated on Mars.' "

"Uncle Leo is not only impressed, he owes Hakim one. And he doesn't even like Muslims, as you can imagine. A Russian Jew and a Muslim? Forget it. Uncle Leo always thought I was crazy to marry Hakim--but he loves me... "

"The district that centered on Cow Street was where the Muslims of Peking congregated. Nieh did not think much of Muslims; their outmoded faith blinded them to the truth of the dialectic. But, against the little scaly devils, ideology could for the moment be overlooked.

He was reasonably well fed, which made the curio-shop owners standing in the doorways of their establishments shout and wave with particular vigor as he walked past. Nine out of every ten of that breed were Muslims. Given the trash they sold, that helped reinforce the view most Chinese had of the Muslim minority: that their honesty was not always above reproach.

Further down Niu Chieh, on the eastern side of the street, stood the largest mosque in Peking. Hundreds, maybe thousands, worshiped there every day. The qadis who led them in prayer had a potentially large group of recruits ready to hand, recruits who could also give good service to the People's Liberation Army--if they would. "

"As early as 1979 China's ruling party, the SPC, served notice of its intent to anyone who might be paying attention. The SPC's official news agency, Xinhua, said: Nearly 160 Moslem mosques of Northwest China are being reopened. . . after damage of varying degrees in the past few years. The mosques are under repair with government funds, including the famed Yinchuan edifice and a Tonxin mosque known to be 800 years old.

And again: The Koran, the sacred book of Islam, is now being retranslated into Chinese.

Though riddled with dissent on many topics, the Associated Islamic Republics were quick to thank China for her turnabout. "

"While the Socialist Party of China carefully nurtured mosques, they regulated churches and synagogues on the mainland, and those were in major cities where worship could be watched easily. "

Islam

China: Ningxia

1955

Sagan, Carl. Contact. New York: Simon & Schuster (1985); pg. 301.

"During the Cultural Revolution, Xi had been consigned as a worker on an impoverished collective farm in Ningxia Province, near the Great Wall, a region with a rich Muslim tradition--where, while plowing an unpromising field... "

"'Exactly. It's more than a process. It's a dialectic. A war. My father was stationed in Xinjiang, with the Moslems. In the old days they were even worse than the Buddhists. Bombings. Machine gun raids. A lot of good government workers were sacrificed. The dynamic of civilization. New against old. Science against mythology.' "

Islam

China: Xinjiang

2050

Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age. New York: Bantam (1995); pg. 253.

"The Chinese Civil War began in earnest three years later... Not long afterward, the Muslim nations had finally gotten their act together and overrun much of Xinjiang Province, killing some of the Han Chinese population and driving the rest eastward into the maw of the civil war. "

Islam

Colorado

1979

Ing, Dean. Soft Targets. New York: Tor (1996; c. 1979); pg. 85.

"He quoted the Koran and T.E. Lawrence. " [Extensive refs. to Islam, not in DB.]

"The doll dormitories of a chemical refinery in the east of the Czech Republic have been firebombed; the Muslim Jihad has claimed responsibility; Darlajane B. has disappeared.

Alex has been down this road before. Now he knows why Darlajane B. was reluctant to tell him anything, and also why she let him meet the two Muslims. He knows almost nothing about the plot, but he can give them up to the Peace Police. "

"Ancient Earth history had no practical value for a 24th century teenager living in a space station... Crusades was just another name for war. European monarchs had waged three campaigns against a distant, Mediterranean people who had different religious beliefs. They had also lived in the city of Jerusalem, which had symbolic significance for the European religion. The First Crusade conquered the city. The Second Crusade hadn't accomplished anything. And the Third Crusade, launched to take Jerusalem back from the Kurd, Saladin, had ended in a truce in A.D. 1192. Saladin kept the city, and the Europeans were granted permission to visit. " [More, pg. 23-24.]

Islam

Egypt

1245 C.E.

Anderson, Poul. The Shield of Time. New York: Tor (1990); pg. 331.

"...cemented firm agreements with the Muslim rulers of Egypt. "

Islam

Egypt

1810

Powers, Tim. The Anubis Gates. New York: Ace (1983); pg. 9.

"...their Master had for quite a while been using a secret army of agents, and an unchartably vast fortune, in an effort to purge Egypt of the Moslem and Christian taints and, even more difficult to throw out the governing Turkish Pasha... And the general who took command of Cairo when Napoleon returned to France... and his efforts to lure the Moslem and Coptic population back into the old pantheist worship of Osiris, Isis, Horus and Ra. " [Other refs., not in DB.]

"Burton grinned, wondering what she would do if she knew that he had suffered from the same disease, caught from a slave girl in Cairo when he had been disguised as a Moslem during his trip to Mecca in 1853. He had been 'cured' and his mind had not been physically affected, though his mental suffering had been intense. "

Islam

Egypt

1920

Wilson, Robert Charles. Darwinia. New York: Tor (1998); pg. 72.

"Britain's remaining military power had been concentrated on shoring up her possessions in India and South Africa... Egypt and Sudan were lost to the Moslem rebels. "

Islam

Egypt

1983

Powers, Tim. The Anubis Gates. New York: Ace (1983); pg. 320.

"Two hundred years ago, he thought, there was a purpose for the army of ex-slaves called the Mamelukes; but in today's Egypt they're an embarrassment that's strangling the country, imposing a crushing and savagely enforced tax on anyone who has money... We wouldn't let them retain that kind of power, especially now that Mohammed Ali is in power and the eyes of the world are watching us... " [More about Ali, pg. 321, etc.]

"'Because of Nur,' explained Ahmed, pointing to the line of tourists waiting to enter the temple grounds, 'everyone has to pass through these two detectors, one for metal and the other for nitrates. These fanatics are determined to destroy the temple and the gods [Temple of the Living Gods]. They have already made several attacks against the temple, but so far they've been stopped before doing much damage.'

'Who are the Nur?' Father Squid asked.

'They are the followers of Nur al-Allah, a false prophet determined to unite all Islamic sects under himself,' Ahmed said. 'He has decided that Allah desires the destruction of all those deformed by the wild card virus, and so the Temple of the Living Gods has become one of his sect's targets.' " [Other refs., not in DB.]

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